NSCO fixes underreporting stats error

Newton County School Resource Officers have a refined process for reporting incidents that happen in Newton County schools after an oversight caused around 1,200 reports to be omitted from those given to local media.

The problem was noticed when a few reports that were a year old popped up recently, which led officials to launch an extensive investigation going back five years to the inception of the SRO program in the county's middle and high schools.

Officials found that reports were being worked and leads were being followed up on, but the reports were getting lost in the NCSO's computer system because the correct box was not being clicked in the sheriff's office internal software. As a result, the reports were not going where they needed to be in the system.

Lt. Keith Crum said the incident was purely clerical and that no incidents occurring at the schools were ignored or not followed up on properly.

Additionally, the glitch would in no way affect the individual school's disciplinary numbers (which The News used to do a school discipline comparison recently), since the NCSO and the schools each keep their own reports for every incident. Hundreds of reports were lost in the NCSO's computer system. Files from all SROs, both current and past, were checked, and each of them had reports that went unprinted.

A newly created instruction manual instructs SROs on how they should report an incident, from assigning a case number to the completion of the report, including what box should be clicked in order for the reports to go where they need to.